A person briefed on the DNC's response says the warning from the FBI and other agencies wasn't specific, and that the extent of the problem wasn't clear when the initial warnings came. DNC officials hired outside help after additional indications surfaced that their systems were compromised.

Russian hackers were implicated in a penetration into the DNC's computer network in June. At the time a federal law enforcement official confirmed the FBI had been investigating the breach for about a year. The official, who is not authorized to comment publicly, declined comment on the source of the hack, but did not dispute an assertion by assertion that Russia was responsible.

I am not sure who to blame for this but I want to say thank you. There is so much insight in those emails. Last October, a leading Democratic donor named Shefali Razdan Duggal emailed a sweetly worded but insistent list of demands to a staff member at the Democratic National Committee.

Ms. Duggal wanted a reminder of how much she had raised for President Obama and the Democrats (the answer: $679,650) and whether it qualified her for the premium package of hotel rooms and V.I.P. invitations at the party’s convention in Philadelphia. She asked whether she could have an extra ticket to Vice President Joseph R. Biden’s holiday party, so she could bring her children. But most on her mind, it seemed, was getting access to an exclusive November gathering at the White House.

The leaked cache also included thousands of emails exchanged by Democratic officials and party fund-raisers, revealing in rarely seen detail the elaborate, ingratiating and often bluntly transactional exchanges necessary to harvest hundreds of millions of dollars from the party’s wealthy donor class.

A lot of people want Trump to be president, on both sides of the political con, in friendly and less friendly countries, he's generally very popular outside these hilarious pages. So its not surprising Putin is also a fan.

Proving the source of a cyberattack is notoriously difficult. But researchers have concluded that the national committee was breached by two Russian intelligence agencies, which were the same attackers behind previous Russian cyberoperations at the White House, the State Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff last year. And metadata from the released emails suggests that the documents passed through Russian computers. Though a hacker claimed responsibility for giving the emails to WikiLeaks, the same agencies are the prime suspects. Whether the thefts were ordered by Mr. Putin, or just carried out by apparatchiks who thought they might please him, is anyone’s guess.

It was hard to see the perniciousness of this attack at first, especially given how news media initially covered the story. The Russians, after all, didn’t knock out a power grid. And when the stolen information arrived, it was dressed in the ideology of WikiLeaks, which presents its exploits as possessing a kind of journalistic bravery the traditional media lacks.

What’s galling about the WikiLeaks dump is the way in which the organization has blurred the distinction between leaks and hacks. Leaks are an important tool of journalism and accountability. When an insider uncovers malfeasance, he brings information to the public in order to stop the wrongdoing. That’s not what happened here. The better analogy for these hacks is Watergate. To help win an election, the Russians broke into the virtual headquarters of the Democratic Party.

The U.S. intelligence community is likely gathering to provide recommendations on next steps, said Finan. The consensus opinion had been that the initial intrusion was for the purpose of intelligence collection, to develop a psychological profile of the next U.S. president."The release to WikiLeaks — which seems to have caught everyone by surprise — changes the calculus significantly," said Finan."It no longer is within the norms of acceptable state behavior."

It is not clear whether the WikiLeaks breach is linked to an earlier incident in June. CrowdStrike Inc., a cybersecurity firm, said last month that the DNC asked it to investigate a suspected breach of its systems that began as early as last summer. CrowdStrike said it quickly found traces of two of the best adversaries in the hacking arena, both tied to the Russian government.

I think Donald Trump really hurt himself by saying Putan and Russia should find the missing emails. That was one thing he cannot say as a presidential candidate. Otherwise the big story here is what was in the leaks not who did it. This was awful, our government is full of criminals.

This will linger on for years to come. We should be appalled at the public broadcast of this minutiae. It will have a chilling effect—campaign staffers will now assume they no longer have the space to communicate honestly. This honest communication—even if it’s often trivial or dumb—is important for the process of arriving at sound strategy and sound ideas.

The cybersecurity company FireEye first discovered APT 29 in 2014 and was quick to point out a clear Kremlin connection. “We suspect the Russian government sponsors the group because of the organizations it targets and the data it steals. Additionally, APT29 appeared to cease operations on Russian holidays, and their work hours seem to align with the UTC +3 time zone, which contains cities such as Moscow and St. Petersburg,” they wrote in their report on the group. Other U.S. officials have said that the group looks like it has sponsorship from the Russian government due in large part to the level of sophistication behind the group’s attacks.

The United States has had plenty of experience with hackers, government and otherwise, but the D.N.C. hack is something new. Rather than using the information seized for intelligence purposes, the hackers selected damaging excerpts from the cache of stolen data, and then leaked them at a pivotal moment in the presidential election.

I think that there are people right here in America that would benefit from a hack like this. After all that has happened and how Hillary has embarrassed this country and her party over and over again. Maybe someone is trying to finally get her out of the race. What do you think?

You would think both parties would be just as angry about this. Not only was it hacked it shows complete corruption. Both the democrats and republicans should be outraged at both incidents. We are under attack and all they can do is argue. We are one country get it together.